Chapter 8 Podcasting

In this chapter, I thought there were very two important points the chapter raised about using podcasts for educational use.  First, I think it's important for teachers try out and become very familiar with podcasting before they have the students create their own, as the chapter suggests on page 117.  There are a few different ways for teachers to get familiar with this technology.  First, using iTunes, there are many educational podcasts to subscribe to.  For me, having never listen to, let alone created a podcast before, this is a good starting point.  I do have iTunes, and am interested in finding one informational educational podcast to subscribe to.  I already have an idea where I want to live and teach, and it is about 20minutes to the school.  On the to and from school I can listen to these educational ideas via my ipod and get some creative idea and suggestions from other teachers and professionals.  After I get the idea of the type of content, length, and quality of podcasts, the next step would be to create my own.  I would love to start by picking a favorite lesson, or a time when a handful of students are missing class to document the classroom lesson.  This way my class can catch up on the work they missed or review an interesting lesson at a later time.  I was very surprised to find that listeners do not need an MP3 player to take part of the podcasting movment.  All listeners need is access to Internet.  I thought that an ipod was necessary because of the "Podcasts" tab in iTunes, assuming it was a unique feature to ipods.  But, now that I know how accessible podacsts are, it's definitely something to look into as an educational learning tool.
The second point I found interesting was using podcasting as a medium for "kids [to] make their learning transparent for others" (pg 116) This idea fits with Dr. Buchanan's model of how teachers should not be the only source for infomation for students.  In this form, students can be learning directly from students.  I probably won't have my students create podcast in my first year teaching, but it definitely seems manageable to have my students listen to other schools'/students' podcasts.  Once I get familar with using them in class, I can have my students create infomational podcasts as a source of infomation to other students, including studnets in my class the next year, and as it will be available on the Web, in any other school.